- [Nicole] Hi everyone, today we're gonna be looking at freedom of information requests. So, the aims of this section are to get a basic understanding of freedom of information requests, to understand their uses and limitations and to get basic advice on writing freedom of information requests which I'll refer to a lot as an FOI. 

So, what is a freedom of information request? So, in 2000, a new act was brought in called the Freedom of Information Act and this gives you the right to ask any public sector organization for information they hold, but this request, it has to be a written request and we can ask various government departments, local councils, yeah, all sorts of organizations, NHS, police, I mean, we're gonna talk about exceptions in a minute, armed forces, regulators, quangos, the BBC, advisory committees, museums and publicly owned companies. 

So, just wanna emphasize like this is a very basic introduction. I'm not like the most experienced with FOIs, but I really want thank David White from the University of Liverpool who developed a lot of these resources that I've kind of pulled stuff from when he taught a session at our investigating company's summer school a couple of years ago. So yeah, there's also a really great training available from the Campaign for Freedom of Information. I think it's about 50 quid for a day, may have changed, but they do really useful workshop about how to do a freedom of information request and you get kind of lots of bumf, lots of good examples. They work with you to help you write one by the end of the day. Yeah, really useful. 

Okay. So, the Freedom of Information Act applies to public authorities. So, publicly owned companies. So, this is companies that are wholly owned by the Crown public authority or government department. So, they're not like PLCs, for example. However, there were like quite a lot of exceptions. So, some of these are information accessible to the applicant by other means. So, if you're able to find something out by looking at, I dunno, the Office of National Statistics or the government news website or something then that would be exempt from a freedom of information request. Information intended for future publication, national security, ministerial certificates, defense, international relations, relations within the United Kingdom, investigations and proceedings conducted by public authorities, law enforcement. 

So, I'm gonna give you an example of an FOI to a police force. But it's kind of just saying that within law enforcement, there are exceptions if that makes sense. So, you might not be able to access information that's kind of very private or confidential to a defendant for example, court records, audit functions, parliamentary privilege, formulation of government policy, et cetera. And again, like I'm no expert on this stuff. So, if you've got any questions about these, it's best to contact the people whose link was at the beginning. So, some of the exemptions continued. So, any prejudice to affect conduct of public affairs, communications with the Royal Family, see this meme here, health and safety, environmental information, personal information, information provided in confidence, legal professional privilege, commercial interests and duty to provide advice and assistance. So yeah, so it's not straightforward that you can get whatever you want, like the exemptions are a little bit complicated and it's kind of beyond the scope of this short talk. 

So, when you submit your written request, so that can be via email or via letter, the authorities have to respond as soon as possible. So, at the very latest, within 20 working days and councils have to reply within 30 days, however, they really style it out. So, if you reply to them, if you contact them on the first, you might not hear from them and then they tell you that you're not eligible for the information or there's an exemption or something like that. It's very frustrating. So, prepare for the long game is what I'm saying and a good top tip is putting them in your calendar. So, obviously, I'm talking about working days here, so it's gonna go even longer, but just put it in your calendar of when you know that they've overrun and then you can contact them and say, I know my rights, you're meant to reply to me within 20 working days and you haven't and they must provide a reasonable ground for delay. 

Otherwise, there's like all sorts of proceedings options, which I'll talk about in a bit. So yeah, there is a strong likelihood that they will refuse, but they have to give you a reason why they've refused, because they do have a legal duty to help you. So, one common reason is cost and this is really, really important in terms of structuring what you ask them. So, public authorities can refuse requests that would cost either more than 600 pounds for central government or 450 for other public authorities to deal with the request. So, I think I might be like wildly plucking this from the air, but I think that's about 30 hour's work or something like that. So, basically if it's gonna take them too long and they don't have the kind of manpower for it, then they can refuse, which is why it's really important to structure your request so that it's a manageable amount of information within their time framework. Likewise, they might refuse on cost if it involves printing lots of documents or like other fees that are involved. But yeah, generally, they relate to cost around time and hours, so it's best to submit a few requests with simple questions that aren't gonna take a very long time to answer. Yeah. Okay and so, yeah, they may also respond with an offer to charge for requests that costs more than these amounts, although this is uncommon and they can also charge for reasonable photocopying and postage costs if the quote is in excess, however. I've never known them to do that to anyone, but who knows? 

So, they can also refuse if they believe the request is vexatious. I really like this word, I dunno why I just really like it, but the meaning is very contextual. So, the kind of definition is kind of like manifestly unjustified, inappropriate or improper use of formal procedure. So, if you're taking the piss basically. So, we've got some handy pigeons here. What's opposite of vexatious? Pleasing, assisting, helpful, soothing, aiding, blah, blah, blah. So yeah, basically, if someone submitted the same request over and over again or were kind of like rude or insulting or abusive or they were kind of like hounding the kind of information officer at council, then the council might see it as vexatious. But again, it's really hard to justify what that means, but yeah, so information officers may ask, can the request fairly be seen as obsessive? Is the request harassing the authority or causing distress to staff? Would complying with the request impose a significant burden in terms of expense and distraction? And is the request designed to cause disruption or annoyance? And does the request lack any serious purpose or value? So, yeah, just bear in mind when you're talking to information officers or submitting requests that you don't want to fall into this pool of people that they're getting annoyed by 'cause you're not gonna kind of achieve your aims and get the information you need. 

So, there are appeals. So, if they refuse your application, you need to write a formal written complaint to the Information Commissioner's Office. Ah no, sorry, I'm lying. You need to write a complaint to that particular public authority asking them to reconsider and then you have the right to appeal to the information commissioner and we'll come back to this in a minute and there's more about it on the link here. Okay. So, now we're gonna go through some examples. So, I should have opened these links up before because of my slow internet. I just want to give a demonstration of some of these in action. So, colleague in Corporate Watch produced some really important research about how charities were collaborating with the home office to raid kind of rough sleepers and deport people. So, a lot of this information came from freedom of information requests. So, you can see here that, yeah, so I'm gonna introduce this website. I may as well just introduce it now, actually. So, there's a fantastic website called WhatDoTheyKnow. So, lots of people, you don't have to make your freedom of information request via this website, but it helps because other people can then check your FOI, see if someone's submitted something similar and yeah, it's a kind of good way to kind of track what's been replied to, what's been successful. 

So you can see here there was like several freedom of information requests about rough sleeping, European Economic Area nationals. So, let's just see this says this one was successful. So, this is looking at the Manchester City Council's relationship to ICE, immigration compliance and enforcement. So, they're looking at how many people have been removed, detained, forcibly removed, voluntarily returned and you can see here, they're like really using the language that the state would use. I'm gonna talk about that more in a minute, but yeah, this particular piece of research, like documents like the freedom of information responses. Yeah, which you can see here, which for the first time, gives some figures on rough sleeper immigration control patrols. So again, come back to your research goals, they can be incredibly useful. Okay. So, now you've kind of got a flavor of them and some of the things to do and not do, we're gonna look at like step-by-step how to make your own freedom of information request. Hopefully by the end of the lesson, you will have begun to draft one. So yeah, the right question is everything, cannot emphasize this enough, they will explicitly answer unless they refuse your question. So, you have to get really clear on what you're asking and what you need to know. It's very useful if you know the kind of like correct lingo on the project. 

So, I just shared that one from Manchester and they were using the language that the immigration authorities would use right? And so it's very useful to know what language and what phrases are likely to be used so that you can get more specific information out of them. And yeah, like I said, this information commissioner's website also has advice about how to find that correct lingo and using sites like WhatDoTheyKnow are really great tools to kind of see what's already been submitted and to see how people have worded things and if you don't know, you can also ask the information officer at the council, for example that you're talking to. So, once you've got incredibly clear on your question and what you want to find out, you need to know what's already out there. So, it might be that someone's already done it before or it's on a public domain. It would really suck to ask an information request and to wait 20 days for them to reply to just find out that it's already on a government report that you could have got 10 minutes before on the government website. 

So, it's useful to know how to search already to see if you can find the information and yeah, you can also check this WhatDoTheyKnow site. So, you can make requests via this site but you can also browse like thousands of requests. If you're unsure about which authority to submit your FOI request to, you can click like view authorities and you can see who are the best kind of email addresses to send things to. Okay. So, once you got clear about your question, you've checked that no one's already done it. You then need to think about the scale of your request. So, will it go over the time cost limit? Okay. So, it's 24 hours, not 30. So, this is worked out as 24 hour's work for central government, parliament and the armed forces and 18 hour's work for all other public authorities. So, think about if your request is gonna take hours and hours for an authority to produce or whether it's possible within that timeframe. 

Okay. So, when you submit a freedom of information request, you need to use a name and an address, but the address is often, it's okay to use an email address as a form of address and that's something that's quite useful for the WhatDoTheyKnow site. Some people, some campaigners like to stay anonymous, so they won't submit a freedom of information request in their personal name. However, if your FOI gets refused and you go onto the appeal process, it can kind of backfire because you then you'll need to be like a legal person or whatever. So, there are kind of ways around things. So, you can, if you don't want to use your own name, you could contact a group like Corporate Watch and we could do it as one of us in our kind of like quote unquote professional roles, maybe someone you know at a university or something could submit it for you. For example, this campaign against prison expansion, different people. Some people in the group were academics, so they felt kind of very safe to put in freedom of information requests and other people were grassroots campaigners definitely didn't want to be connected to that particular struggle in a kind of open way. So, everyone's different, but one cop said, they're gonna Google you anyway. So, if you use a name, they might Google it and that might lead them to think something is vexatious or it might show them that you are kind of genuine person with a genuine inquiry and that they obligated to help you. 

Okay. So, step five is a recommendation that it's good to kind of make an informal contact with someone in the organization. So, you can kind of get like a little bit of a pre chat to ask them if it's possible, is this likely to go over the amount of time? Should I phrase this better? They are actually obligated to help you write the best request that you can, but sometimes just having that kind of like human contact can help build that rapport up. We're gonna talk about that more in a later lesson, but yeah, it can be useful to establish that contact. It's not completely necessary at all, especially with sites like WhatDoTheyKnow. But yeah, it can help. Okay. So, when you are making your FOI requests, you need to be as specific as possible. And like I said, it's all about the question. If you are unsure about the information that is available, you might need to kind of ask for a list or a schedule of the information first, so you know what you can kind of apply for, if that makes sense. And it's worth remembering that not all information is held in like paper records. So, you do need to explicitly write in paper and electronically recorded information. That way you might be able to get copies of emails for example. 

It's a bit of a sneaky game. Like people, if you haven't asked for it explicitly, they're not kind of obliged to give it to you. So yeah, it's worth phrasing your FOI really skillfully. Okay. So, step seven, keep in contact after you've submitted the FOI and just remember that they're obliged to reply and like I said, track when you've submitted them, keep a little database or spreadsheet or just put it in your calendar just to keep on top of the requests you've submitted. Okay and step eight, is just be aware of the limits of your data. So, it might not be usable in the way that you hope, like it may not be comparable across authorities or may not be consistent across time. So, you might think some piece of information's incredibly critical to your campaign, but again, come back to your research goals, come back to what you're doing this for and you might realize it's not actually that useful and then it's been a bit of a red herring to write like 100 FOI requests to every council in the country, for example. And once you've got that data, it is just data at the end of the day, it's not organizing, it's not action. So yeah, just kind of be aware of the limits of the FOI request and don't put all your eggs in that one basket. 

All right. So, now we're gonna look at some different examples. So, this was about the use of drones by the police. So, you can see here, it says dear City of London Police, please can you tell me if the City of London Police has used drones. So, they've put the kind of name that drones are kind of used as, UAVs during 2019 to 2020. So, they've put a very small timeframe, very specific timeframe which will mean that it might not take that long for the authorities to research this and they've added either operationally or in testing. So, they're trying to get very specific there with this FOI. If drones have been used, please confirm the dates of their use, the purpose for using them and the company which supplied them. So again, bullet points are great. They're really specific, easy to answer, explicit about what you want to know and then the City of London police replied and they were like, we do not use drones, but this particular FOI is very clean and simple and you could easily copy and paste this and send it to different council, different police forces around the UK for example. 

Okay and then just again, like how this has been used in a practical campaign. So, David Scott, who is an academic and organizer who focuses on alternatives to prisons, he submitted an FOI to the Ministry of Justice. And he said, can you please tell me which local authorities in England and Wales, so sometimes this is quite useful as well to specify which country and to which authorities, so he's put local authorities, submitted plans to the Ministry of Justice in 2016. So, he said, you know, again very specific, there's a date in there. There's a closed timeframe regarding suitable land for building a new prison in that area. So, that could potentially be more specific, the end here, but actually, it's very clear, it's very simple, it's unlikely to go over a certain amount of time and they replied with a convenient little table of all the different councils that had submitted plans to the Ministry of Justice regarding land for a new prison. So, this was useful for this campaign Community Action on Prison Expansion, who could then kind of, you know, we knew that these prison programs were coming, we knew that they were gonna announce new locations, but we didn't quite know where and by having this convenient little list of councils, we were able to narrow down our search and they eventually submitted for prisons in Wellingborough, in East Riding. Was there any other ones? Kent and then they've got canceled, but yeah, so, we still had quite a large area of councils to do events in or to try and build local contacts in, but it really helped us give us a heads up of where a potential new prison could be. 

Okay and then this is a really amazing example of how this has been used as a campaign tool, freedom of information requests. It's just waiting for it to load on my computer. So, what this is, is the Palestine campaign, produced this University Complicity Database. So, what they've done is the person creating this database did work for Corporate Watch for a short time and what happened was they submitted freedom of information requests to universities as authorities all over the UK to see about the investments in companies. So, let's just see, I don't know, let's go for Birmingham. Okay. So, we can see here that Birmingham University has investments in Collins Aerospace and HSBC and you can see the value of investment and yeah, I kind of saw the backend of this database and it was this very impressive collection of freedom of information requests to all different authorities and councils and pension schemes and universities and that was like how this person kind of put together this huge database of universities that had money invested in developments in Israel. So, yeah. So again, check out the resources linked in the spreadsheet, Just practice. If you like, you can feel free to email us something you've written if you want our eyes on it and we can help you with that. The Information Commissioner's Office have loads of resources. There's lots of guides online, but just try now again, practical, practical, practical, try and write an FOI request that's relevant to your campaign and see, yeah, see what information you can find.